Popular geopolitics

Understanding the wider cultural context of geopolitical models is important for the reason that it is through institutions such as the media and education that ordinary people are drawn into the political process as subjects of various political discourses. The media and education explain the linkages between their audiences and what is being explained in order to provide a context of interpretation. People are told what various changes and occurrences both at home and around the globe mean to them personally. Popular culture presents imagined geographies to their audiences and explains where individuals fit into these political models. Intellectuals of statecraft in order to make their arguments sensible, they refer to concepts and values that have consonance for the population at large, if their support is to be assured. Geopolitics is no more a discrete and relatively contained activity confined only to a small group of wise men who speak in the language of classical geopolitics. Simply to describe a foreign policy is to engage in geopolitics and so normalize particular world view.

For establishing relation wider range of groups, political elites use stories and images that are central to their citizen’s daily lives and experiences. By reducing complex processes to simple images with which their audiences are familiar, geopoliticians render political decisions natural or could make the result of the process appear predetermined. Sport metaphors are also used by politicians to show the rules of the game are understood by players within which there are clear winners and losers. This wider context of interpretation is important and arguments often rely upon accepted models, metaphors and images. These are common sense statements reproduced in education and popular culture. Through these institutions, people with little political education learn about different places whether this is a list of factual data or more metaphorical narration. As a result popular geopolitics have a special significance in reproducing the values and beliefs upon which more formal geopolitical statements must draw in order to resonate with various audiences.

Else where, world cultural decline is blamed on learning values of the education system, which leaves students ignorant on how life in a free and democratic context is different. Consequently, street protests replace informed election processes. Education systems are not adequate if they do not fulfill their societal role to teach the basic information necessary to maintain democratic society. Otherwise people may well not be prepared for even the most basic national responsibility – understanding what the society is about and why it must be preserved. An informed citizenship is the basic principle that underlies the system of education. People in a democracy must be entrusted to decide on all important matters for themselves because they have the means to literacy and can deliberate and communicate with one another.

Nonetheless, the territoriality of geography of good and evil at the end of the Cold war might not be so easy to define. The assumption is that without popular recognition of a powerful opponent, the threats to a coherent national identity fragment. Involved within the structure of identity is a romantic desire for chaos and uncertainty which can be restrained through various heroic trials. This version of national identity requires an organizing purpose and a populace signification of danger over which the nation can triumph. This means that when nation’s enemies are not clearly recognizable, identity becomes difficult to define in this way. The nation’s destiny and identity depends upon the existence of an identifiable threat somewhere. For example, German ideologists and politicians projected dark account of enemy, both in 19 and 20th centuries.

Without the unordered spaces, or spaces distorted by war, it is impossible to stage the wanderings and disorientations, the quests and conquests and conversions, the sufferings and sacrifices and triumphs that are the elements of romance. The ultimate enemies of romance, then are not the foreign foes held at bay by these essential opponents; rather it is the banal, ignorant, populace, quotidian world of calculation - the compromises from which the heroes of romance always remain distant. It is suggested that popular democracies do not refer their citizens to higher aims leaving a vacuum that can be filed with sloth, self indulgence, banality and desire for wealth.

‘However selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles of his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it’… Adam Smith, 18th century